Sustainable Approaches to Reducing Food Waste in India

About a year ago I spent a month in India working on an MIT research project focused on food waste with a classmate and close friend, Paul Artiuch. Throughout that month, we blogged extensively about what we learned both on the MIT Public Service Center website and on this site. Here’s a summary of what we wrote:

1. Battling Food Waste in India
2. More on Azadpur Mandi
3. India’s Cold Storage Capacity
4. A Look at India’s Agricultural Supply Chains
5. The Punjab Potato Party
6. India’s Grain Storage Problem
7. India’s Lack of Food Processing
8. Smaller Markets in Rajasthan
9. Four Problems with India’s Food Supply Systems
10. Pune: A (Nearly) Waste-Free City

Since we returned, we’ve generally received an email or two a week from researchers who are working on similar initiates and are interested in learning more about what we did and what we found. It’s great to see that the time we spent to understand the problem and more specifically the unique dynamics of food waste in India turned out to be a useful investment. Our main goal was to complete some ground-level research that others who might be interested in starting a business, NGO, or more extensive research initiative could build on.

The topic has recently gotten quite a bit of media attention, as a new comprehensive study on global food waste was just completed by the UK’s Institution of Mechanical Engineers. There’s a great article on it here, and WonkBlog had a nice post on the topic here.

Paul and I have been sending out a report we put together on the topic to anyone who contacts us asking for more information. Given the number of people who are interested in learning more, we decided it makes sense to just publish the report online. So here it is: Sustainable Approaches to Reducing Food Waste in India.

As always, if you have any questions, feel free to contact Paul or me.